Her Impossible Boss

by Cathy Williams

  ‘I didn’t realise that we would be having a meeting in such grand surroundings,’ she carolled gaily, making sure to get the conversation onto neutral work-orientated territory as soon as possible. If nothing else, it did wonders to distract her from the glimpse of hard-muscled chest just visible where the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, and the way his fine dark hair curled alluringly around the dull silver strap of his watch.

  Matt tore his eyes away from her and glanced round at the sumptuous décor which he casually took for granted. ‘The food’s good. It’s the reason I keep coming back here. French food always makes a change from steak.’

  ‘Not nearly as good as the spaghetti Bolognese your daughter cooked for you a few days ago, though. You have no idea how long it took us to stockpile all the ingredients. Everything had to be just right. The mushrooms. The shallots. The quality of the mince.’

  Tess was babbling. Where had this sudden attack of nerves come from, she wondered. She had seen enough of Matt Strickland in the past few weeks to have killed any nerves she might have around him, surely? But her pulses were still racing and her mouth still felt dry, even after the two hefty sips of wine she’d gulped down from the crystal wine glass in front of her.

  ‘And let’s not go into the length of time it took us to find just the right recipe book,’ she confided. ‘I think Samantha looked at every single one at three separate bookshops. I had to stop her from trying to wheedle me into buying her a pasta machine. Can you believe it? I told her that it might be better to start simple and then move on to the complicated stuff. You…er…have an incredibly well-equipped kitchen. Everything new and shiny…’ She trailed off in the face of his unnerving silence. ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ she asked awkwardly. ‘I thought you wanted me here to talk about how things were coming along with Samantha.’

  ‘You have a way of running away with the conversation,’ Matt murmured. ‘It’s always interesting to see where it’s going to lead.’

  Tess tried and failed to take that as a compliment. The smile she directed at him was a little wobbly at the edges. ‘You make me sound like a kid,’ she said in a forced voice, and he tilted his head to one side, as though giving that observation some thought.

  ‘Maybe that’s why you’ve worked out so well as her nanny.’ He flashed her a veiled amused look, but for some reason Tess was finding it hard to see the funny side. ‘The other nannies the agency supplied were nothing like you. They were far more regimented. Samantha refused to be told what to do, ran circles around them, and they eventually ended up handing in their notice. The more she had, the more I gave instructions to the agency that the next one should be stricter. I can see now that it was completely the wrong ploy. I should have been trying to find someone who was more on her level.’

  ‘How many did she have?’

  ‘Five—although one only lasted three days. They did their best to discipline her. In nine times out of ten they might have had success with that approach…’

  ‘I discipline her,’ Tess interrupted defensively.

  ‘Do you? How?’

  ‘If you don’t like the way I do things…’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tess. Haven’t I just told you how well I think you’re doing? You’ve achieved wonders in a matter of weeks!’

  ‘But I don’t want you to think that the only reason I’ve succeeded is because I let her do exactly what she wants! You gave me permission to get her a new wardrobe of clothes. Do you remember I discussed this with you? Do you remember I told you to look around at the other kids her age in New York and see what they were wearing? When she goes to her new school she might find it easier if she shows up in the same sort of clothes as everyone else. I said all this to you and you agreed! So we went shopping and, yes, some of her things did come from markets, but she’d never been to a market before. She enjoyed the experience!’

  ‘How have we landed up here?’

  ‘We’ve landed up here because…because…’ What should have been a cool, businesslike conversation in relaxed surroundings was falling apart at the seams—and it was her fault. Was it any wonder that he was staring at her as though she had taken leave of her senses? He had complimented her on her progress and she had responded by snapping. She was miserably aware that she had snapped because she didn’t want him implying that she was somehow immature, and she wasn’t sure why she cared.

  ‘Because it hasn’t all been about Samantha having fun. I’ve had to really coax her out of her shell, and I admit it’s easier to coax a child when you dangle something in front of her that she wants. But I’ve also been doing schoolwork with her.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘She’s told me.’

  Tess didn’t miss the flash of quiet satisfaction that crossed his face, and she made a big effort to remind herself that this was why she so enjoyed the job. Because she had been instrumental in helping to heal some of the rifts between Matt and his daughter. And if Matt patted her on the back and patronisingly complimented her on getting the job done because she was immature enough to win over her charge, then so be it.

  ‘You’ve proved yourself wrong.’ He leaned back in the chair as menus were placed in front of them and more wine was poured into glasses. ‘How does that feel?’

  ‘I’ve only gone through the basic stuff with her,’ Tess mumbled, blushing.

  ‘It’s a mountain when your starting point was insisting that you were incapable of doing simple maths and science.’

  A slow, palpable sense of pleasure radiated through her, made her feel hot and flustered, and although she knew that his dark, lazy eyes were on her, she couldn’t bring herself to meet them.

  ‘Well, I won’t be taking a degree course in them any time soon.’ Tess laughed breathlessly.

  Claire might have given her long lectures about his ruthlessness, but this was a side of him to which she had been not privy. Claire hadn’t seen the complete human being. She had just seen the guy who issued orders and expected obedience.

  ‘But doing something of which you didn’t think yourself capable must have gone some distance to bolstering your self-confidence…’

  Her eyes flew to his, and she had a few giddy seconds of imagining that those dark, deep, brooding eyes of his could see right down to the very heart of her. Her voice was shaky as she gave her order to the waiter, and when she thought that the conversation might move on she was greeted with a mildly expectant silence.

  ‘I’ve always had bags of self-confidence,’ she muttered eventually. ‘You can ask either of my sisters. While they were buried under heaps of books, I was always out having a great time with my friends.’ Why did she get the feeling that he didn’t believe her? And his disbelief had to be infectious, because she was almost failing to believe herself. ‘I may not be going out a great deal in the evenings now, because of my working hours,’ she said, relentlessly pursuing the point even though he hadn’t contradicted a word she had said, ‘but I’m normally the kind of girl who always had lots of invitations.’

  ‘And you miss that?’

  ‘We’re not here to talk about me.’

  ‘But in a way we are,’ Matt pointed out smoothly. ‘You spend more time with my daughter than I do. It’s important for me to know your frame of mind. I wouldn’t want to think that you might be storing up resentments. So…you’ve spent most of your evenings over the past few weeks at my apartment. Does that bother you? When you’re accustomed to spending your time going out with friends?’

  He watched her fiddle with the stem of her wine glass. Her cheeks were flushed. Her thick, straight, toffee-coloured hair hung like a silky curtain over her shoulders, halfway down her back. Amidst the plush, formal surroundings she looked very, very young, and suddenly he felt very, very old. A quick glance around him confirmed that there was almost no one in the restaurant under the age of fifty. The fabulously high prices excluded all but the very rich, and he was an exception when it came to
being very rich and the right side of forty. He had grown up in an ivory tower and had never had cause to leave it. It discomfited him to think that curiosity, if nothing else, should have driven him out at least for a brief period of time.

  Annoyed to find himself succumbing, even temporarily, to an unusual bout of passing introspection, Matt frowned, and Tess, seeing the change of expression, was instantly on her guard.

  Was he going to tell her that she needed to stop spending her evenings at his home? Did he disapprove? Maybe he hankered after more one-to-one time with Samantha and she, blithely unconcerned, was in the process of just getting in the way.

  Maybe she should suggest reverting to normal working hours.

  Dismayed, Tess realised that she didn’t want to do that. How had that happened? How had Matt Strickland and his daughter and their complicated family life suddenly become so integral to her day-to-day existence?

  Her thoughts were in a whirl as food was placed in front of them—exquisite arrangements of shellfish and potatoes that Tess would have dived into with gusto were it not for the feverish whirring of her mind.

  ‘I’ll curtail my hours if you want me to,’ she heard herself say in a small voice.

  ‘I don’t believe that’s what I was asking you,’ Matt told her impatiently. He had become accustomed to her never ending cheerfulness, and the despondent droop of her shoulders made him feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. ‘You’re my employee,’ he said tightly. ‘And I have certain obligations as your employer.’

  Tess hated that professional appraisal. She realised that she didn’t want him to have any obligations as the guy who had hired her, but when she started to think about what she did want her thoughts did that crazy thing again and became tangled and confusing.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to turn around at some later date and accuse me of taking advantage of you.’

  ‘I would never do that!’ Tess was horrified and offended.

  ‘You’ve insisted on forgoing any overtime payments.’

  ‘You pay me enough as it is! I like sticking around in the evenings and helping out with Samantha.’

  ‘Doesn’t do much good for a social life for you, though, does it?’

  ‘I didn’t come over here to cultivate a social life,’ Tess said firmly. Well, she admitted to herself, that was a bit of an exaggeration, thinking back to the dismay with which she had greeted the suggestion of a job, but that was in the past so it didn’t count. ‘I came here to try and get my act together and I have.’ Her natural warmth was returning and she smiled at him. ‘I feel like I’ve finally found something I really enjoy doing. I mean, I think I have an affinity with kids. I don’t get bored with them. You’d be surprised how clever and insightful Samantha can be without even realising it. I can get all the socialising that I want when I get back home.’ Which was something she wasn’t going to start thinking about just yet.

  ‘And do you socialise with anyone in particular there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re an attractive young woman.’ Matt shrugged and pushed aside his plate, which was swept up by a waiter seconds later. ‘Left any broken hearts behind?’

  ‘Oh, hundreds!’ Tess said gaily. If he thought that she was immature and green around the ears, how much more cemented would that impression be if he knew that being ‘one of the lads’ and having loads of friends who happened to be boys was a far cry from having a solid relationship with one in particular.

  ‘So was that part of the reason you came over here?’

  ‘No!’ Tess protested uncomfortably.

  ‘Because no boy is worth it. Not at your age.’

  ‘I’m twenty-three. Not thirteen.’ Just in case he had missed that, which she suspected he had. Because she had never, not once, caught him looking at her with male interest. While she…Tess flushed and felt something scary and powerful stir in her, as though finally being allowed to take shape. She had looked at him. Released from their Pandora’s Box, little snapshots of him began swirling in her head. The way he looked when he was laughing, the way he raised his eyebrows in lazy amusement, that half-smile that could send shivers down her spine—except it hadn’t. Not until now.

  Uncomfortable in her own skin, Tess struggled to get her thoughts in order while her innocuous remark hovered in the air between them, challenging him to assess her in a different way altogether.

  As though the reins of his rigid self-control had suddenly been snapped, Matt was assailed by a series of powerful, destabilising images. She might look young, with the stunning attraction of dewy skin and an open, expressive face that was a rare commodity in the hard-bitten world in which he lived, but she wasn’t thirteen. She especially didn’t look like a teenager in that dress she was wearing, which left just enough to get the imagination doing all sorts of interesting things. It took massive will-power to pull himself back from the brink of plunging headlong into the tempting notion of taking her to his bed.

  She was his daughter’s nanny! What the hell was going on in his head? It grated on him to know that this wasn’t the first time he had played with the idea. He should know better. Work and play mixed as successfully as oil and water. He had never brought his private life to work and he wasn’t about to start now. Tess Kelly might not hold down a job within the physical walls of his offices, but she was as much his employee as any one of the hundreds who worked for him.

  And, even taking that small but vital technicality out of the equation, Tess Kelly didn’t conform to anything he required from a woman. Having lived through the horror that had been his marriage, wedded in unhappy matrimony to a woman who had fulfilled all the requirements on paper and none in practice, as it turned out, his checklist when it came to women was stringent.

  It was essential that they were as focused as he was. Focused and independent, with careers that were demanding enough to stave off any need for them to rely on him to define their lives. Like him, Catrina had come from old money, and her life had consisted of fundraisers and charity balls and lunches and all those other little things that had left her with plenty of time to decide that his duty was to provide a never-ending diet of excitement. There had been no need for her to work, and she had, in any case, never been programmed for it. And into the void of all those empty hours when he had been working had crept the seeds of bitterness and disenchantment. She had wanted a rich partner who wanted to play, and he had failed to fulfil the specification. In the aftermath of that experience, and the consequences it came to entail, Matt was diligent in never straying beyond his own self-imposed boundaries.

  Belatedly, because she had been away and contact between them had been sporadic and via e-mail, he remembered Vicky. She was in Hong Kong, getting a taste for the Eastern markets. She was due back in a couple of days’ time. He tried to pull up a memory of what she looked like, but the second he thought of her dark tailored bob and the neat precision of her personality another image of a bubbly, golden-haired girl with a dusting of freckles on her nose and a personality that was all over the place superimposed itself on the woman who claimed to be dying to catch up with him.

  Irritated, he frowned. Then his face cleared and that vague feeling of being out of sorts began to ebb away.

  ‘Tell me your plans for the next few days.’ He pushed himself away from the table and signalled to the waiter for some coffees.

  ‘Plans?’ Still fretting over her tumultuous thoughts, it took Tess a few seconds to register that he had completely changed the subject. ‘A museum, and then a quiet day just relaxing with Samantha tomorrow. Maybe I’ll grab an early evening and catch up with my social life, now that you’ve put that idea into my head.’

  ‘And then on Friday perhaps we might visit the zoo…’ said Matt.

  This was a breakthrough. Instead of just following the tide, he was actually generating an idea of his own! Pure delight was all over her face as she nodded approvingly. She would take a back seat, watch father and daughter together, remind herse
lf that her involvement with them both began and ended as a job.

  And Matt, watching her carefully from under lowered lashes, calculated on Vicky’s presence. The two of them, side by side, would squash uninvited rebellious thoughts for which he had no use. He and Vicky might not be destined for the long haul, but she would be a timely reminder of what he was looking for in the opposite sex.

  Matters sorted satisfactorily, and feeling back in control, he signalled for the bill.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OVER the next two days Tess had ample opportunity to think about herself. Matt had asked some very relevant questions, and had kick-started a chain of thoughts that made her uneasily aware that the things about herself she had always taken for granted might just be built on a certain amount of delusion.

  She had always considered herself a free spirit. Her sisters had been the unfortunate recipients of their parents’ ambitions. Neither of their parents had gone to university. Their mother had worked as a dinner lady at the local school, and their father had held down a job in the accounts department at an electrical company. But, they were both really clever, and in another time and another place would have gone to university and fulfilled all sorts of dreams. They hadn’t, though, and consequently had taken an inordinate interest and delight in Claire and Mary’s superhuman academic achievements.

  Tess had set her own agenda from an early age and had never deviated. Just in case her parents got it into their heads that she was destined to follow the same path, she had firmly set her own benchmark.

  She had always thought that she loved living too much to waste time hiding away in a room in front of a pile of books. She liked sampling things, getting a taste for different experiences. She refused to be tied down and she had always been proud of her thirst for freedom.

  Matt’s take on things had badly damaged that glib acceptance. She wondered whether her happy-go-lucky attitude stemmed from a deep-rooted fear of competition. If you didn’t try, then you weren’t going to fail—as he had said to her on day one—and she had never tried and so had never set herself up for a fall. She had been offended and resentful at his implication that she lacked self-confidence, and yet she knew that she had never made the most of her talents. Underneath the pretty, popular, happy-go-lucky girl, had there always been an anxious, scared one, covering up her insecurities by wanting to be seen as the antidote to her sisters? Had she cultivated her social life—always being there for other people, always willing to lend a hand and always in demand—because that had helped her prove to herself that she was every bit as valuable as her two clever sisters?